Tag: #parenting

When I think of how hard it must have been for my mother to raise me, I think of the one time we went to the state fair in Juarez. There was a band playing some very loud music, and there were a lot of people dancing and having a good time. Mom and I rode some of the rides…

I won’t bore you with the details because the video is quite good on its own. Basically, NJ legislators in a committee voted to advance a bill for a vote. The bill would require parents seeking a vaccine exemption for attending school to do one of several things. They can get a physician to write a letter that required vaccines…

When my wife and I found out that we were going to be parents, we kind of freaked out a little. It wasn’t that we were not ready. We were, mostly. It’s just that we were aware that a little person would soon be joining us, and we would be responsible for their life. We had to keep them alive,…

I remember being a child and having Strep throat in the summer a couple of times. It was miserable. It was so bad that I could not wait to go see the doctor and have my grandmother give me a shot of penicillin. (I spent most summers with my grandparents in the ancestral hometown in Mexico.) She would bundle me…

Let’s face it, unless you’ve been a parent before, there is very little that can prepare you for being a parent. I thought I was going to be ready for this adventure from helping mom raise my little brother 30 years ago. I must have lost something in those years, because there was very little I was ready for when…

I traveled with my wife to New York City for a conference she was attending. While she was at the conference, the baby and I walked downstairs at the hotel to get some food. Well, she immediately started crying, and I don’t blame her. There were a lot of people, a lot of noisy people, and the lights were very…

There was a tremendous earthquake in Mexico City today, 32 years to the day of the big one in 1985. (Seriously, what are the odds?) There is also a category 5 hurricane heading to Puerto Rico. In Myanmar, the army is systematically killing Muslims as the survivors of the “cleansing” are making their way to Bangladesh by the thousands. The…

Everybody who knows anything about raising a child from birth warned me about the lack of sleep. They were not joking when they said that sleep would become a big commodity in our lives. In fact, my wife and I kind of dreaded what was to come from the very first night we spent with our baby. As a newborn,…

A friend of mine pointed out to me that I had written a blog post referencing “The Child” back in 2012. In fact, my wife and I talked about The Child as far back as I can remember being with her. (That’s something I didn’t do with other girlfriends, by the way.) We started off joking about what a “weirdo”…

When I was a teenager, there was a lot of pressure for me to finish high school and get a job. The pressure didn’t come from either of my parents, actually. It came from my uncles and cousins. In our culture, education was one of those things that you did because you had to and not because you wanted to.…